On Q Professional Investigations

US Justice Department prosecutors pleaded with a federal appeals court to allow the placement of GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of suspected criminals without first obtaining a search warrant.

This argument goes against the Supreme Court ruling in the Jones case back in January which we have reported on extensively here at RMT, and asks the court to reconsider their decision. The ruling makes the practice of placing a tracking device without obtaining a warrant illegal, as it violates an individual’s Constitutional rights.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing the arguments, and the Obama Administration claims that the Jones ruling was not specific enough. Basically, because it did not make clear the need to obtain a warrant in each and every situation, a loophole was left wide open which actually allows GPS tracking despite the court’s intentions.

The brief submitted to the court argues that “requiring a warrant and probable cause would seriously impede the government’s ability to investigate drug trafficking, terrorism and other crimes,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The brief also argues that the tracking of a person’s movements using a GPS device is only a “limited intrusion” on one’s privacy.

In US v. Jones, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the use of GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of suspected criminals without a valid warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, more specifically unreasonable search and seizure. Those who advocate for privacy hoped that this decision would have set the precedent for cases dealing with warrantless tracking for all kinds of electronic surveillance devices besides GPS devices.

Currently, law enforcement is able to access digital records such as emails and cellphone location data without obtaining a warrant. However, searches within schools and at border crossing locations have been deemed exempt from the warrant requirement.

View Source

Duke University has pipped companies such as Google and Microsoft to the post to develop an indoor GPS system that can locate users as accurately as 1.6 meters.

It could have a host of applications, says Romit Roy Choudhury, associate professor of computer engineering at Duke, for example allowing shoppers at stores to use their phones to learn more about the products in front of them, or helping parents to locate their children in malls. It could also help navigation in hospitals or smart homes.

The system, dubbed UnLoc, short for unsupervised indoor localization, is based on the way people use landmarks in outdoor environments. If Alice is in Bob’s neighborhood and calls him for directions, she can tell Bob she is standing in front of a fountain, and he can guide her from there.

“Our technique adopts the same intuition – it takes advantage of ‘invisible’ landmarks in indoor environments that a mobile phone can sense using its built-in sensors,” says Choudhury.

“Example landmarks could be distinct motion signatures created by elevators or stairwells, because the phone can detect motion, or certain dead spots where WiFi or 3G signals are absent.”

Once such an invisible landmark is sensed, the phone can work out its current location, and then track its forward path using motion sensors such as accelerometers, compasses and gyroscopes.

While the tracking can become inaccurate over time, the phone can continuously correct its location as it discovers other landmarks.

“The best part of the application is that it is recursive, which means that it starts with zero knowledge but ‘learns’ over time,” says He Wang, lead PhD student on the project.

“Therefore, it becomes more and more accurate the more it is used in a given building.”

Crucially, UnLoc doesn’t require any pre-deployment effort, or ‘wardriving’, whereby every location needs to be visited and calibrated to create a database of per-location fingerprints. This is expensive even as a one-off, and often needs to be repeated periodically.

It’s also less battery-hungry than GPS, thanks to the use of energy-efficient inertial sensors, available in almost all smartphones.

In tests at the Northgate shopping mall in Durham, NC, and on Duke’s campus, UnLoc achieved 1.6 meter accuracy on average.

“Further improvement is feasible by learning more landmarks and improving the tracking algorithms,” says Duke undergraduate Alex Mariakakis.

Read more

The nightmare goes like this. In the future, the government will track your every step with miniature GPS devices, or worse, your own phone, turning it into a technological Judas. It will suck up oceans of your most personal data. Its cameras will capture you and its computers will catalog you. Phone companies and others will predict, package and sell your every move. Government eyes will be everywhere. The police will strip you naked at will. And at any moment, a predator drone will park a missile on your nose. Only Summer Glau can protect you.

Is the nightmare here? Maybe. Police departments are now asking phone companies to give them up-to-the-minute location information and other data linked to our cell phones, without a warrant. Phone companies are happy to comply, but not for nothing: They levy “surveillance fees,” essentially putting information for sale, including text messages, phone records, and “clones” of phones’ contents.

A recent decision, however, shows how resistant America’s courts are to this near-term dystopian future. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that the attachment of a GPS device onto a car to track its movements constitutes a search under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. The decision was unanimous but the reasoning was fractured; it’s already infamous for its Scalia-Alito colloquy comparing GPS devices to “very tiny constables” who, “with incredible fortitude and patience,” hitch a stealthy ride on your stagecoach.

In other words, slapping a GPS device under a car’s bumper isn’t the same as having an officer follow it around, because it’s much more effective and far, far easier.

In Jones, the Supreme Court agreed that 4th Amendment search and seizure protections govern the government’s use of GPS devices. The judges all agreed that the police should have gotten a valid warrant in that case, and so they agreed that the evidence collected from the GPS device should be thrown out. The judges disagreed, however, on why the government needed a warrant.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, held that the government’s warrantless use of the GPS device on the car was a trespass on personal property. A concurrence, written by Alito, argued that the intrusion was a violation of personal privacy rights. Sotomayor positioned herself as the swing vote, filing her own concurrence, in which she essentially agreed that physical intrusions or privacy intrusions can be “constitutional” searches. She also argued, crucially, that cellphone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy that they not be tracked, and they information gathered about them by third parties not be given up.

What does this mean for covert cellphone tracking? Scalia’s view would require a physical trespass before finding that a “search” took place. With cellphone tracking, there isn’t an obvious trespass — just a request. The government doesn’t plant any item on your property, nor does it need to “seize” anything.

As Alito pointed out, technology is making tracking and surveillance possible without any physical intervention at all. In Alito’s view, the longterm monitoring of one’s car is a violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy. But when pressed, Alito sounded resigned:

[E]ven if the public does not welcome the diminution of privacy that new technology entails, they may eventually reconcile themselves to this development as inevitable.

Sotomayor wants both our property and privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment, and she’s not so sure that the “tradeoff” between technology and privacy is worthwhile — or inevitable. But she’s more or less alone.

Henry Kissinger famously said that “the illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little while longer.” Whether our police’s new comfort with warrantless phone tracking is legal, illegal, or unconstitutional may well depend on which of these rationales wins the future. In the meantime, keep a close eye on your iPhone. It’s probably watching you.

Read more

Greensboro, N.C. – Many parents have debated with their children about getting a cell phone. Children want a cell phone, but parents aren’t sure if the kids are mature enough to handle the responsibility.

News 2 spoke to a private investigator who said you can actually use a cell phone to track and locate your child. All three major cell phone companies offer this service.

It works by using GPS technology and cell phone towers within a few minutes you can get a good idea of where your child is at.

“I think the technology piece is very critical because now you’re able to pinpoint the exact location most of the time,” Kerry Graves, founder of Graves Investigations, said.

If you have an iPhone, you can simply turn on the “Find my iPhone” setting and that works just as well. Private investigators also have access to other technology that can locate a phone even without those services turned on.

Graves said adults are often easier to find than children because adults tend to leave more evidence behind — like credit card payments.

Social media is another tool investigators rely on to find missing people. Younger generations tend to post a lot of information about themselves, what they’re doing and whom they’re talking to.

Oftentimes, investigators find a clue on Facebook or Twitter and that help them solve the case.

“Family Locator” options:

Verizon
AT&T
Sprint
Find my iPhone

Read more

Mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, can be used for more than just communication – they can become a valuable tool in your investigations. Using the latest technologies and applications, you can turn your mobile device into a handheld surveillance monitor. What if you could track down skips that are on the run – or hiding out – by pinpointing their exact location via satellite or BlueTooth signal? You can!

Here are some applications to help you get started:

1. Creepy: Albeit a startling name, this application allows you to gather geolocation-related information about a person from social networking platforms and image hosting services like Twitter and Flickr. The app searches a person’s account for pictures tagged with geodata and then displays the locations on a map.

2. Mobile Spy: mSpy from Mobile Spy lets you monitor, track, backup and access data. You can view photos, videos, text messages, contact lists, emails, calendar items, Web history, and more.

3. ToothTag: This technology from NeuAer allows you to track someone’s location using their mobile phone’s BlueTooth signal.

4. Spyera: Spyphone from Spyera uses GPS positioning to show the coordinates of a skip’s mobile device and its physical location on a map. You can configure your account settings to get real-time updates and display a skip’s travel route a certain periods of time.

Read more

A Missouri federal judge ruled the FBI did not need a warrant to secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to a suspect’s car to track his public movements for two months.

The ruling, upholding federal theft and other charges, is one in a string of decisions nationwide supporting warrantless GPS surveillance. Last week’s decision comes as the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the issue within months in an unrelated case.

The ruling from Magistrate David Noce mirrored the Obama administration position before the Supreme Court during oral arguments on the topic in November. In short, defendant Fred Robinson, who was suspected of fudging his time sheets for his treasurer’s office job for the city of St. Louis, had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his public movements, Magistrate Noce said.

The GPS tracking in 2010, Noce continued, “corroborated that Robinson’s employment time sheets were false.”

Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the Supreme Court in November oral arguments that federal authorities employ warrantless GPS monitoring “in the low thousands annually.” Dreeben also said the government could affix GPS devices, without warrants, to the vehicles of the nine members of the Supreme Court.

Many of the justices were skeptical of the government’s position, saying the United States could evolve into a surveillance state if the Supreme Court sides with the government.

Justice Stephen Breyer told Dreeben, “If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen of the United States.”

Noce ruled PDF

***Here, installation of the GPS tracker device onto defendant Robinson’s Cavalier was not a ‘search’ because defendant Robinson did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the exterior of his Cavalier. Agents installed the GPS tracker device onto defendant’s Cavalier based on a reasonable suspicion that he was being illegally paid as a ‘ghost’ employee on the payroll of the St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office.

Installation of the GPS tracker device was non-invasive; a magnetic component of the GPS tracker device allowed it to be affixed to the exterior of the Cavalier without the use of screws and without causing any damage to the exterior of the Cavalier. The GPS tracker device was installed when the Cavalier was on a public street near defendant’s residence. Installation of the GPS tracker device revealed no information to the agents other than the public location of the vehicle. Under these circumstances, installation of the GPS tracker device was not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.***

Read more

Earlier this week we discussed the case of a St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office employee who is accused of timesheet fraud. Federal investigators followed the man around after hearing reports that he was collecting a salary despite not doing any work. After the investigation the man was charged with wire fraud and federal program theft. The main question that remains is whether the evidence against the employee was obtained illegally.

The government is not allowed to use evidence against a person that is the result of an unreasonable search and seizure. It is unclear whether the FBI’s decision to clip a GPS tracking device to the man’s car constituted an illegal search and the issue is currently before the Supreme Court.

FBI agents tracked the man’s car movements and compared the movements with his timesheets. Although the admissibility of the GPS tracking information is unclear, challenging the validity of a search is one of first things that an experienced criminal defense attorney will consider when devising a comprehensive defense strategy against federal charges. The inadmissibility of key evidence may destroy the government’s case and result in the dismissal of charges against a defendant.

It is unclear what the government’s case against the man will consist of if the GPS evidence is deemed inadmissible. There is also a separate issue of whether the man’s job was necessary in the first place. It appears that the treasurer’s office outsourced many of the functions of the man’s job. The Post Dispatch also reported that the man has not been suspended despite the federal charges against him.

The man is also accused of embezzling $250,000 in public funds from the Paideia Academy charter school which he used to run.

Read more

To his supervisors, Fred Robinson must have seemed the ideal employee.

Every weekday that he worked in 2010 except one, the St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office employee started work at precisely 7:30 a.m., his time sheets say.

But an FBI agent testified Thursday that Robinson typically had a much more relaxed schedule, leaving his house at 9 a.m., spending an hour at a local diner, then driving between his second job as the head of a charter school and his third job, starting his own day care. The FBI gleaned those details largely from a GPS tracking device that agents had hidden on his car.

Special Agent Monique Comeau never mentioned Robinson doing any of the work that he claimed to be doing on the time sheets that he submitted to his bosses – slowly cruising city streets, looking for broken parking meters or illegally parked vehicles that hadn’t been ticketed.

Robinson was indicted in September on one count of wire fraud and seven counts of federal program theft. He was accused of looting more than $250,000 of public money from the now defunct Paideia Academy charter school to use for his day care business and as much as $175,000 from his so-called no-show or “ghost employee” job with Treasurer Larry C. Williams’ office.

Comeau’s testimony came during a hearing called to challenge the FBI’s use of the GPS tracking device without a court order – an issue that is currently in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Robinson’s lawyers also are asking U.S. Magistrate Judge David Noce to separate the criminal case into two parts, saying that there is nothing that connects the alleged theft from Paideia to the alleged no-show job with the city.

Noce said that he would take the motions by Robinson’s lawyers “under advisement.”

Comeau said that agents began investigating Robinson when they heard that he was a ghost employee. After some interviews in late 2009, a team of agents began tailing Robinson on his daily rounds. Then they slipped into his St. Louis neighborhood in the early morning darkness on Jan. 22 and surreptitiously attached a tracking device to his car.

Two months later, they removed it. Comeau said that the GPS records showed that Robinson’s time sheets were false.

The Post-Dispatch asked for copies of Robinson’s time sheets and work reports for 2010 after his indictment, but an outside lawyer for the treasurer’s office refused, saying that they were exempt under Missouri’s open records law. A different lawyer for the office eventually relented and provided the records.

Those time sheets not only contradict the GPS tracking data, but statements by the treasurer’s office about Robinson’s job duties and Robinson’s own version of his job.

Lawyer Bill Kuehling told the Post-Dispatch in September that Robinson was the office’s field security officer, investigating reports of large coin transactions that may have come from parking meter money.

He also said that Robinson was not a no-show employee and was free to work the hours he chose.

Robinson told the Post-Dispatch after his arrest that he checked parking meters for possible theft, saw to it that meters were working and ensured that drivers were paying to park on lots.

The 2010 time sheets indicate that Robinson spent each week cruising a different section of St. Louis.

Robinson listed the areas of the city that he covered. On the first week of the year, for example, Robinson wrote, “During this period visited Chippewa to S. city limits and Grand to Broadway.”

Most of the time, for 42 of 52 time sheets, he records that he spotted nothing amiss, writing, “observed no apparent violations.” On nine occasions, Robinson noted that he had spotted expired meters with unticketed vehicles on his tour. Once, he reported an inoperable meter.

He never mentioned checking city parking lots or conducting employee investigations.

Those time sheets raise questions because most parking meter operations were outsourced by the treasurer’s office in 2009. The request for proposals specifically mentions meter maintenance and “rigorous meter revenue & security controls,” but treasurer’s office staff did not respond to questions Thursday about whether Robinson’s job functions had been outsourced.

Also unclear is the value of notifying the office about an unticketed vehicle at an expired meter as much as a week after it had been spotted, and without identifying the make or model of the vehicle.

Last month, the treasurer’s office refused to release Robinson’s employment status, claiming the information was part of his personnel record, and not required for release.

But the treasurer’s discipline policies don’t allow for paid suspension and records show Robinson, a longtime friend of Treasurer Larry Williams, is still getting paid.

In court Thursday, while objecting to prosecutors referring to Robinson as a ghost employee, lawyer Diane Dragan said that he had been showing up for work and doing his job.

“Despite a federal indictment, the city has found him worthy of a paycheck,” she said.

Responding several minutes later, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said, “That may be. Stranger things have happened.”

Lawyers on both sides declined to comment on the case after the hearing.

Williams has declined to comment on the case, as has Robinson’s supervisor, Roy White.

Read more

A smartphone application that gathers information on the location of its users was downloaded by more than 1.5 million people, and the data was sent to an advertising company in the United States, according to experts.

The application in question is a goldfish catching game that does not require any information about the user’s location to play.

As the GPS data makes it possible to identify a user’s location with a margin of error of several meters, it would be possible to presume the user’s home or office address if such information was accumulated, they said.

An image showing what type of information is collected appears on the screen before installation, but only a small number of users correctly understand the explanations, the experts said.

There have been no guidelines available on information gathering for smartphones despite the rapid spread of the devices. This seems to have aggravated the situation.

According to an analysis by KDDI R&D Labs in Fujimino, Saitama Prefecture, at the request of The Yomiuri Shimbun, the free application released on the Internet last month was designed to send Global Positioning System information from smartphones to a U.S. advertising firm at a rate of about once per minute.

When the application is installed, an image appears on the screen with a message reading “the range of access authority and positional information.” Approval of the reading of positional information is requested but there is no mention of its purpose and whether the information will be transmitted remotely.

The software development company that produced the application released it on 238 application markets since November last year, and 1.5 million people have installed it, according to the firm.

The collected information was found to have been used to display ads highly connected with the locations of application users.

“When we created the application, we built in the programs sent from a U.S. advertising company, with which we had made a contract for ad placement, without confirming their contents,” the president of the app development company said. “We had no idea that private information was being transmitted, because the game’s content has no connection with positional information.”

The U.S. advertising firm insists that information about users’ locations is collected to provide more convenient advertisements and that no problems will arise because information is treated anonymously.

As with the case of the application development company in question, programs for delivering ad content are provided by advertising companies to application developers. Many of the programs are believed to include modules capable of reading and gathering personal information, the experts said.

KDDI R&D Labs surveyed 980 applications both at home and abroad in August. They found 27 percent of them were equipped with functions capable of reading positional information; 11 percent were found to be capable of reading the contents of a telephone directory; and 58 percent of them were found to be capable of acquiring IDs associated with terminal devices and telephone numbers.

Keisuke Takemori, a senior researcher at the KDDI labs, said: “Virus infection of smartphones has emerged as a problem, but we are also in a situation where even legitimate application software could cause information leaks. Users are not told how the collected information will be used.”

In May last year, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry compiled guidelines on personal information gathering through information technology devices, calling for clarification of purposes and identification of who will collect such information.

The ministry pointed out the software in this case could “deviate from these principles,” but has yet to put forth effective measures to deal with it partly because it involves a foreign advertising company.

The ministry formed a study group on smartphone cloud security in October. The group’s main job is to work out measures against computer viruses. It has yet to launch a full-scale study of information gathering of legitimate application software.

Read more

A week later when he was back in San Jose, he checked the device, and it appeared to have been repositioned slightly on the vehicle to make it less visible. It was placed on the underside of the car in the wheel well that holds a spare tire.

Greg, a Hispanic American who lives in San Jose at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, contacted Wired after reading a story published last year about an Arab-American citizen named Yasir Afifi who found a tracking device on his car. Greg wanted to know what he should do with the device.

Afifi believed he was being tracked by authorities for six months before a mechanic discovered the device on his car when he took it into a garage for an oil change. He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security. Afifi has filed a suit against the government, asserting that authorities violated his civil liberties by placing the device on his vehicle without a warrant and without suspicion of a crime. His attorney, Zahra Billoo, told Wired this week that she’s requested a stay in her client’s case, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court in the GPS tracking case now before it.

Greg’s surveillance appears to involve different circumstances. It most likely involves a criminal drug investigation centered around his cousin, a Mexican citizen who fled across the border to that country a year ago and may have been involved in the drug trade as a dealer.

“He took off. I think he was fleeing. I think he committed a crime,” Greg told Wired.com, asserting that he himself is not involved in drugs.

Greg says he bought the SUV from his cousin in June, paying cash for it to a family member. He examined the car at the time and found no tracking device on it. A month later, he drove his cousin’s wife to Tijuana. Greg says he remained in Mexico a couple of days before returning to the U.S.

The first GPS tracker, out of its sleeve. Photo courtesy of Greg. View here

It’s possible the surveillance began shortly after his return, but Greg discovered the device only about three weeks ago during his visit to Modesto. The device was slipped into a sleeve that contained small magnets to affix it to the car.

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, Wired photographer Jon Snyder went to San Jose to photograph the device. The next day, two males and one female appeared suddenly at the business where Greg’s girlfriend works, driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows. A witness reported to Greg that one of the men jumped out of the car, bent under the front of the girlfriend’s car for a few seconds, then jumped back into the Crown Victoria and drove off. Wired was unable to confirm the story.

The following day, Greg noticed that the GPS tracker on his own car had been replaced with a different tracker, this one encased in a clam shell cover attached to a large round magnet to hold the device to the car. The device was attached to a 3.6 VDC Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery.

There was no writing on the tracker to identify its maker, but a label on the battery indicated that it’s sold by a small firm in Farmingdale, New York, called Revanche. A notice on a government web site last June indicates that it was seeking 500 of the batteries and 250 battery chargers for the Drug Enforcement Administration. A separate notice on the same site in 2008 refers to a contract for what appears to be a similar Revanche battery. The notice indicates the batteries work with GPS devices made by Nextel and Sendum.

A spokeswoman with the DEA’s office in San Francisco, however, declined to say if the device on Greg’s vehicle was theirs.

“We cannot comment on our means or methods that we use, so I cannot provide you with any additional information,” said DEA spokeswoman Casey McEnry.

Second GPS tracker with clam shell casing and Lithium Polymer battery.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com View here

The second device on Greg’s vehicle appears to be a Sendum PT200 GPS tracker with the factory battery swapped out and replaced with the Revanche battery. The Sendum GPS tracker is marketed to private investigators, law enforcement and transportation security managers and sells for about $430 without the battery. With the factory battery “it will last 7-15 days reporting every hour in a good cellular coverage zone,” according to marketing literature describing it, and it uses CDMA cellular communications and gpsOne location services to determine its location.

When this reporter drove down to meet Greg and photograph the second tracker with photographer Snyder, three police cars appeared at the location that had been pre-arranged with Greg, at various points driving directly behind me without making any verbal contact before leaving.

After moving the photo shoot to a Rotten Robbie gas station a mile away from the first location, another police car showed up. In this case, the officer entered the station smiling at me and turned his car around to face the direction of Greg’s car, a couple hundred yards away. He remained there while the device was photographed. A passenger in the police car, dressed in civilian clothes, stepped out of the vehicle to fill a gas container, then the two left shortly before the photo shoot was completed.

The Obama administration will be defending the warrantless use of such trackers in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. The administration, which is attempting to overturn a lower court ruling that threw out a drug dealer’s conviction over the warrantless use of a tracker, argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices.

It’s unclear if authorities obtained a warrant to track Greg’s vehicle. While Greg says he’s committed no crimes and has nothing to hide, the not-so-stealthy police maneuver at his girlfriend’s place of employment makes it look to others like she’s involved in something nefarious, he says. That concerns him.

It concerns attorney Billoo as well.

“For a lot of us, it’s like, Well I’m not selling cocaine, so let them put a tracking device on the car of [a suspect] who is selling cocaine,” Billoo says. “And I’m not a terrorist, so let them put the device on someone [suspected of being] a terrorist. But it shouldn’t be unchecked authority on the part of police officers. If law enforcement doesn’t care to have their authority checked, then we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Read more